What does Page Rank mean?

Page Rank has to be one of the most often misunderstood elements in SEO.

Invented by Google it measure the 'authority' of a page by giving a rough idea (on a scale of 0-10) how many backlinks it has and of what quality they are.

For example a page with 1,000 low quality backlinks can have a PR0 while a page with 3 high quality backlinks can have a PR2.

Within a website an individual page can have a higher PR than the front page because of this but whatever the case you can use your highest PR page to pass juice to other pages within the site.

What Page Rank doesn't do is guarantee your site rankings for a particular keyword. It is one of many factors taken into account by Google which means it is quite common for a website page with PR0 to outrank a website page with PR5.

When building backlinks Page Rank can be a useful tool in deciding whether to pursue a backlink on a particular page on a particular site but care should be taken. For example:

Just because the front page of website X has a PR3 does not mean the page you get a link from will have any Page Rank worth mentioning.

Even if a particular page has a high PR if there are dozens of outgoing links the link juice will be spread so thinly that the Page Rank will have no relevance.

On some websites backlinks count because they are seed sites even though no link juice is passed and thus the Page Rank of the page has no meaning.

I'm Tim Hill, a Search Engine Optimisation and Online Marketing specialist. I created this site to help others understand that SEO is not a mysterious black art!.